


keeping watch in the night

by echelons



Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Character Study, Gen, redemption is a long road and jason hasn't quite realized that yet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-09
Updated: 2019-02-09
Packaged: 2019-10-24 18:58:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17709740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/echelons/pseuds/echelons
Summary: Red Hood finds Batgirl in need of help, but she's reluctant to accept it from him.





	keeping watch in the night

**Author's Note:**

> This is set pre-Flashpoint, except not really because there are some obvious differences from canon. The most important ones are that Bruce isn't and hasn't been dead, Tim is still Robin, and Jason has, for reasons of his own, agreed to stop killing people.
> 
> warnings for canon typical violence & references to violence and a character being drugged

It took Red Hood a moment to recognize Batgirl in the crumpled form on the roof. She was curled up, knees to her chest, and she looked even slighter than usual. With her dark cloak over her, she blended almost seamlessly with the shadows. As he made out the shape of her in the dark, his first, overwhelming thought was that she was dead.

Jason dropped onto the roof near her and approached cautiously, wary of a trap. As he reached her, he saw with a flash of relief that she was breathing, shallow but steady. He reached out and gently turned her over, and as he drew his hand back, he realized that the fabric at her shoulder was tacky with blood. Pulling the flashlight from his belt, he looked her over. It would be hard to tell without cutting the costume off her, but there didn’t seem to be enough blood loss to knock her out, and she wasn’t bleeding from any wounds other than the cut on her shoulder. Carefully, not wanting to startle her, he pulled up an eyelid and checked her pupil dilation.

“Oracle,” he said, activating his comms.

“Hood.” Barbara’s voice was crisp and professional. Jason might have been allowed to stay in Gotham- once he’d promised not to kill again- but it didn’t mean that he and the Family were on particularly friendly terms.

“I’ve got Batgirl.”

“What?” Oracle’s cool tone dropped away instantly.

“I’m with Batgirl. She’s been attacked-”

“ _Batgirl?_ What happened?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t see anything. I just found her lying here, she’s bleeding some but not too bad. Listen,” Jason ground his teeth together before saying, “I think she’s been drugged. She needs transport to the Cave.”

There was a brief pause, and then Oracle said, “Understood.” The comm crackled softly in his ear for a long moment before she spoke again. “Either Batman or Robin can be there in ten minutes.”

He understood the implicit question. “Robin.” He didn’t particularly want to have to have interaction of any kind with his replacement, but it was a better option than talking to fucking Batman.

“He’s on his way,” Oracle said, and then the line went dead.

Jason sat down on the roof, right next to Batgirl, his back against the rough brick wall. Suddenly desperate for a breath of fresh air, he took his helmet off and set it carefully next to him as he breathed in the sweet, filthy scent of Gotham City. He tipped his head back to look at the stars, nearly smothered by the smog but still shining. Jason had seen the stars in greater glory, in remote locations across the globe, far away from the polluting light of any city, but, for his money, they never seemed so precious as they did above Gotham.

Jason yelped as his head hit the wall behind him, a figure suddenly above him, her foot on his chest, her cape billowing behind her. Cassandra Cain-Wayne had moved from unconscious on the ground beside him to looming over him, pinning him in place. She paused for a moment, and although Jason couldn’t see her face, he knew she was scrutinizing him, weighing him to see if he was a threat. Then, with a flick of her cloak, she leapt lightly backwards and started across the roof.

“No, wait-” Jason scrambled to his feet and in a few short strides was beside her. “You can’t just leave.”

Cassandra shrugged off his hand and reached for her grapnel, but he could see, now, that her body whole body was shaking slightly, her muscles exhausted from the exertion of fighting against the drug in her system.

“Wait!” Jason seized her by the wrist. With her other hand, she struck at out him, and he dodged it easily. That told him more about her condition than anything else. He was fast, sure, but he wasn’t Batgirl-fast. Not normally. “You’ve been drugged. Robin is on his way to get you. You need to stay here for five minutes.”

“I am _fine_ ,” she snarled. The stubbornness in every line of her body reminded Jason in that moment so strongly of Batman that he nearly let her go. He remembered, for the first time tonight, that Batgirl being Cassandra Cain- _Wayne_ meant this was his sister. Some raw and ugly emotion was climbing its way up his throat.

“If you were fine,” he said, forcing that feeling down, “I wouldn’t have been able to stop you.”

This time, when she wrenched her hand from his grasp, he took a step back. She walked to the edge of the roof, looked down, and then looked back at him. “Robin?”

He nodded. “Replacement’s on his way.”

She sat down on the ledge at the edge of the roof, her back to him, her legs dangling out over the alley below. Remembering the way her whole body had shaken moments before, Jason opened his mouth to say something before thinking better of it. That she was still here was a major concession already, and he didn’t want to push his luck. If she fell to her death, well, that was on her.

For want of something to do, he lit a cigarette, breathing in deeply and trying not to think about how he’d promised to quit smoking. After a moment, he asked, “So what happened? From what I hear, it’s rare someone gets the drop on you.”

She didn’t look at him, silhouetted against the familiar constellation of Orion, low on the horizon. The Hunter. “Don’t talk to me.” She said. “We are not on the same side.”

“Batman-” He broke off. He’d been about to say that Batman trusted him, but that certainly wasn’t true. Batman trusted that Jason wouldn’t break his promise, and that was all. “Batman thinks we can work together.”

“Batman is wrong,” she said. He wanted to make a joke, something along the lines of _Oh, you think so too? Welcome to the club_ , but when she continued, the anger in her voice cut away any thoughts of their similarity. “You killed. You… _chose_ to kill.”

Jason knew the distinction she was making. She had killed. He had chosen to kill. She’d had every instruction in the art of murder, and when given half a chance, she’d made the choice to be something different. He’d been raised to fight with one inviolable rule, and instead, he’d broken it, again, and again, and again. They were neither of them the people they’d been raised to be. For better or for worse.

“And now I’m choosing not to,” he said. “Isn’t that good enough?”

Cassandra shook her head vigorously. “I see them.” She spoke slowly, carefully. Jason knew she was doing her best to choose her words perfectly, even as she had to fight against the effects of the drug in her veins. “The people I did not save. The ones I failed. It is like I killed them.” Then she turned to look at him, her eyepieces glaring with reflected light. “I see them. I hope you see them too.”

Jason dropped his cigarette on the ground and crushed it beneath his heel. He forced his voice to be light and casual in response, as if chatting with his adopted sister about how she hoped he was haunted by the memory of everyone he’d killed was a typical weeknight activity for him. “Fat chance. They were scum, and they deserved to die.”

“No one deserves death.” She turned her head away again, and Jason felt a wave of anger at the casual dismissal.

“What about me? Did _I_ deserve to die?” He didn’t raise his voice as he walked towards the edge of the roof, the gravel crunching beneath his heavy steps. Although he was desperately trying to hide his feelings, he could hear the rage seeping into his tone anyway and knew that was a losing battle. “Do you know why I died? I died because of every single fucking time Batman didn’t kill the Joker. I died because- because Gotham’s goddamned guardian decided that that psychopath’s life was more important than mine.”

He laughed, bitterly. He stood very close to the edge now, looking down at the drop below, gripping the ledge so hard he could feel it through his gloves. Batgirl perched a few steps away, watching him coldly. “Every single person- every single one- who’s ever been killed by the Joker could have been saved with one tiny little bullet in his brain. But no, they were the sacrifices that had to be made at the altar of Batman’s Golden Fucking Rule. Nobody deserves that.” He snorted. “What the hell do you know about it anyway?”

“I know death,” she said, unflinching, meeting his white-hot rage with a cold fury of her own. “And I know that you are wrong.”

It wasn’t, he realized, the naïve belief of someone who thinks they can end the war despite never having fought a battle. Here she was, bleeding, drugged, alone over a drop in the worst city in the world with a man she didn’t trust, and her conviction was as fierce and unwavering as the stars that burned above her. It was a conviction that had survived contact with the alternative, time and again, and he felt abruptly unmoored, his rage rendered petty in comparison. It pulled him up short, the idea that he’d never, in all his life, believed in something that strongly. He’d killed when it was convenient, and now that it wasn’t a strategically advantageous move, he was willing not to. Whatever words he used to justify it, they were nothing more than gilding around the core of his anger and fear.

A grappling hook hit a nearby wall with a dull _thunk_ , and a moment later, Robin swung onto the roof next to Batgirl. He looked warily between Jason and Cassandra before moving towards her. “Are you alright?” He asked, low and concerned.

“I need to go after her,” Batgirl said, and Robin nodded. They spoke together in low tones, an easy back-and-forth that revealed a trust that felt all too familiar.

Jason wasn’t surprised when no one stopped him from leaving.

 

Oracle called, hours later, just as he got back to his apartment. Her timing was eerie, so much so that he suspected she’d been watching his location, waiting for him to get off patrol. Some other time, when he wasn’t filthy and exhausted, he’d have to go through his equipment and make it harder for her to track him.

“Batgirl’s alright,” she said without preamble.

“Okay,” he said, unsure why she was calling.

Oracle sighed. “I wanted to say thank you. Batgirl does a lot of good in the city. You did the right thing.”

“Mother of God,” Jason swore. “You think I was going to leave her there alone? Unconscious and bleeding? Just because, what, she’s Batman’s new favourite and you don’t think I can handle that?”

“Oh, go to hell.” Barbara sounded more tired than angry. “I’m not dealing with this bullshit tonight.”

“Hey, Oracle?” He said, before she had the chance to hang up. “Would you pass on a message for me? To Batgirl?”

“What is it?”

“Tell her-” he paused, hesitating. It was hard for him to admit to weakness, but he felt that after tonight, he owed to Batgirl. To Cassandra. And if Barbara realized what he meant, it wouldn’t be the worst thing. Oracle knew how to keep secrets from Batman, and she’d been his Batgirl once, back when he was Robin, and that still meant something. “Tell her that I do. I see them.”

On the rooftops of the city, out there underneath the stars, was a family of heroes who’d chosen not to kill. And maybe someday, if he was lucky, he could count himself among their number again.

**Author's Note:**

> The medical science in this is beyond sketchy, to the point of being nonexistent, but that's a genre convention in comic book stories, so I hope you'll forgive me.
> 
> The title comes, of course, from "Stars" from Les Mis.
> 
> As always, kudos and comments are appreciated, and as it's my first time writing Cass, I'd appreciate feedback if there's something about my portrayal/characterization of her that could be improved.


End file.
